


how am i gonna get myself back home?

by Swira



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: CW science, Team Arrow, Team Flash, the best kind of science really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:41:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21774616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swira/pseuds/Swira
Summary: The explosion - implosion, Cisco would have corrected under other circumstances - wasn’t immediately followed by panic. There were no screams, not even a sound, for a few very long seconds after the initial blast. Everyone stood mostly frozen in the Cortex, looking at the monitor displaying the camera view of the pipeline where, only a moment before, Barry and Oliver had been trying to contain this week’s metahuman.Now, both of them and Antonia Monetti - for whom Cisco had yet to find a nickname - had vanished.
Kudos: 12





	how am i gonna get myself back home?

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the result of a ~1 week hyperfixation and I’ll be honest, I haven’t watched a single episode of Arrow aside from the crossovers, so I have no idea what’s going on in this show aside from the fact that there is a lot of drama. All of that to say, I’m sorry if Team Arrow’s OOC in this. And if Team Flash is too, I guess, because maybe I fucked that up too who knows
> 
> This is set in a patchwork of a timeline, really, because, as I just said, who knows what’s going on in Arrow? So I’d say it’s set after Flash season 2, except Barry didn’t go back in time at the end and fuck everything up. I kept what I liked and left out the rest, basically.

The explosion - implosion, Cisco would have corrected under other circumstances - wasn’t immediately followed by panic. There were no screams, not even a sound, for a few very long seconds after the initial blast. Everyone stood mostly frozen in the Cortex, looking at the monitor displaying the camera view of the pipeline where, only a moment before, Barry and Oliver had been trying to contain this week’s metahuman.

Now, both of them and Antonia Monetti - for whom Cisco had yet to find a nickname - had vanished.

No one had even thought things would go south so easily. After all, the plan was fairly simple: get Monetti in one of the pipeline’s cells. That was it. Her plasma powers were too unstable and dangerous to try and do anything else before she was properly contained, and everyone seemed okay with that idea. She was dangerous, of course, but they had the Arrow as reinforcement, and no one had thought even for a second that the both of them could be in any real danger.

  
That said, they hadn’t expected Monetti to lose control of her powers and implode right next to them.

“What happened?” Diggle was the first one to find his voice back, but even he sounded shaken. This did nothing to reassure Cisco: the man was supposed to composure incarnate.

At least his question seemed to snap everyone else out of their horrified daze, and Joe rushed to Cisco’s side, his gaze intently fixed on the screen in front of him.

“Where are they?” he asked. His eyes roamed over the camera feed as if he was going to spot Barry somewhere. Cisco opened his mouth, but found himself unable to speak.

“They aren’t— dead, are they?” Iris’s voice wavered.

“No, they can’t— they’re not,” Cisco said, forcing himself to sound surer than he actually was.

“Where are they, then?” Diggle repeated forcefully, his worry translating to anger. 

Instead of trying to come up with an explanation he didn’t have, Cisco chose to focus on assessing the situation and pulled up the suit’s sensors’ data. He felt a cold shiver run down his spine as the information popped up in front of him.

Thea leaned over his shoulder. “What does that mean?” she asked, frowning at the now empty windows usually displaying Barry’s vitals.

“I— don’t know, this is…” He frowned, typing a few controls to make sure this wasn’t a malfunction. When he confirmed it, he didn’t know whether to feel relieved or even more worried.

“Is he dead? Please tell me this doesn’t mean he’s dead,” Felicity said next to him, her eyes frantically going from the screen to him, then back to the screen.

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Cisco said, unable to keep the uncertainty out of his voice. He caught Caitlin’s questioning look from the corner of his eye and went on, “If he was dead, or if the suit had been destroyed by the blast, we’d be getting flat vitals. Instead, it looks like he’s just… gone?”

“What do you mean, gone?” Joe asked, starting to sound annoyed too.

Cisco made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know! It looks like he’s out of STAR Labs’s satellite’s coverage.”

“And how far does your satellite reach, exactly?” Diggle asked, raising an impatient eyebrow.

“It’s worldwide,” Felicity said before Cisco could answer, a dawning look on her face.

He nodded, wincing.

“What does that mean?” Thea asked hesitantly, searching the scientists’ faces for a clue as to what was happening.

“It means they’re not anywhere on Earth,” Caitlin said, earning herself a disbelieving look from Team Arrow.

“Wha— what do you mean, anywhere on Earth?” Diggle said.

“We have to check the footage from the camera and see if we can get anything from the seconds before the blast,” Cisco said, chosing to ignore the question and reaching for his keyboard, but Felicity beat him to it, having apparently already gotten over her confusion - or being very good at compartmentalizing.

She pulled up the footage from the camera in the pipeline’s entrance. Oliver was seen in a corner of the room, shooting right at Monetti’s face, forcing her to focus on him to destroy his arrows before they hit her and thus giving Barry an opportunity to push her back into the cell. It felt weird rewatching this, remembering how sure they were that it would go down according to plan, now that they knew it definitely had not.

Cisco had to fight to urge to look away as Barry hit Monetti at full speed, only to be blasted away when he touched her body. The video quality wasn’t ideal, but it was enough to see the neon glow emanating from her. She’d managed to partially turn her body into plasma, something they didn’t know she could do until that very moment. Cisco remembered thinking it was pretty cool, at the time. Now he felt kind of sick thinking about it.

Barry hit the wall on the opposite side of the room as Monetti threw a ball of energy at Oliver, the vigilante barely managing to duck as he was briefly distracted by the speedster’s aerobatics. Barry couldn’t be seen from this camera’s angle, but it was pretty safe to say he had been more than a little hurt by his collision with a wall of pure energy. That had been confirmed when Oliver had to dive for him to make him dodge a ball of plasma Monetti sent his way.

For about two seconds, both men were out of the camera view, but three arrows could be seen flying Monetti’s way. The meta didn’t even bother avoiding them, letting them hit her, only for them to be destroyed on impact.

At that moment, they’d all started to get really worried. Barry was seemingly out, and Oliver - as good as he was - didn’t stand much of a chance alone against a meta this powerful.

Diggle and Thea had already announced they were coming in as reinforcements - despite Oliver’s unequivocal objections and Thea’s still recovering plasma-burned leg - and were going for their weapons, but then Monetti’s behavior suddenly changed and they stopped in their tracks.

From angry and confident, the meta went to panicked and horrified, her stance faltering. They could see her look at her hands, shaking, the glow she was emitting growing brighter by the second.

“She’s losing control,” they could hear Barry faintly say on the video, a fear in his voice that, at the time, had caused all of them to freeze for a split second, and now made Cisco’s stomach churn.

Then everything happened really fast.

Oliver had charged Monetti, pressing the cell door’s closing button as he passed it and managing to push the meta back the few steps it took to make her enter the pipeline cell. She was distracted enough that she didn’t actively try to blast him away, but from the vigilante’s pained groan as he tackled her, it was easy to tell touching her wasn’t pleasant either.

The door closed, trapping them both inside just before Barry finally came back into view. He wasn’t looking good, the front of his suit badly damaged in every place it had touched Monetti, and he wasn’t even able to use his speed to get to the door, only managing to limp his way there. He pounded on the glass as he reached it, Oliver leaning against the other side. His face was twisted in pain, his gloves smoking, destroyed by his contact with Monetti.

The meta had collapsed in a corner of the cell, tearing at her arms as if she could rip the plasma away, the light coming off of her now bright enough that her shape on the video was barely recognizable as human.

Because he had been busy trying to come up with a solution to get Oliver out of there before he blew up, Cisco hadn’t been able to hear the two men’s exchange as it had happened. Felicity had been urging him to open the sas, Caitlin desperately trying to explain it was too dangerous, while Joe was screaming at Barry to get away from the blast.

Everyone had been too panicked to even listen to what they were saying, and looking at it now, Monetti’s screams of terror covered most of their conversation.

“—out of here.”

“—way, we can—“

“—everyone, Barry.”

The blast blinded the camera and even though they knew it was coming, everyone looking at the feed startled. When the bright light receded, Barry, Oliver and Monetti had disappeared.

They were left staring at the empty cell, the amount of damage surprisingly minimal considering the force of the meta’s implosion. The glass had broken, shards scattering the pipeline’s entrance, and black charring covered a good portion of the walls and ground, forming a haunting human shape where Monetti had been moments prior.

There was a beat of tense silence before Cisco remembered why they were rewatching that in the first place.

“There has to be something we’ve missed,” he said as he rewinded to a few seconds before the explosion, his hands shaking slightly.

“It must have happened too fast for us to see,” Felicity added, taking over the keyboard and pressing a few controls to slow the video down to half its speed.

“I hate to be the one to say it, but how can you be so sure?” Diggle asked. “How can you be sure they didn’t just—”

“They’re not,” Iris interrupted before he had a chance to finish, her tone almost firm enough to make Cisco believe her. Almost.

Still, he nodded, trying to convince himself he was as sure as she sounded.They couldn’t have just died, he couldn’t imagine it, no matter what the small voice in the back of his head kept repeating.

“Here!” Felicity exclaimed suddenly. Everyone looked at where she was pointing at the screen.

She’d paused the video, freezing it in the millisecond before white covered the screen. Monetti had started to blow, a whole half of the cell already engulfed in the blast. The poor quality left a lot of room for deducing exactly what was going on, but there was no mistaking the red figure halfway through the cell’s door, reaching for Oliver.

“Is that Barry?” Thea asked, confused.

“He got to Oliver in time,” Cisco said on an exhale, a mix of incredulity and relieved giddiness in his voice. Until that moment, he hadn’t thought it possible for Barry to phase through the door and get Oliver out of there in so little time. Even for him, that was very fast.

“Are we saying that Barry can go through doors now?” Diggle said flatly.

“You should be happy he can, that’s how he managed to save Oliver’s ass,” Cisco retorted absent-mindedly, already running some calculations on the speed Barry must have reached.

“Okay, so we know he got to him in time, but then where are they?” Iris asked impatiently, gesturing at the screen.

“If he was able to save Oliver, Barry must have been going way faster than we ever thought possible of him,” Caitlin said slowly, frowning the way she usually did when she was thinking hard. “It’s even possible he had to time travel…”

“And if he did, it means he used the speed force,” Cisco added understandingly, starting to see where she was going.

“I’m sorry, can you two use normal people words? I have no idea what’s going on,” Thea interrupted, edging on irritated.

“Okay, I’d have to do a lot of math to confirm it,” Cisco said, spinning in his chair to face Team Arrow, “but it’s possible that Barry’s speed - combined with the energy that Monetti released as she went kaboom - were enough to allow him to rip through our dimension and into another.”

His dumbed-down explanation was met with a wide-eyed stare from Diggle and Thea, Felicity only looking half as disbelieving as them.

“So, just so we’re clear,” Diggle started slowly, pinching his nose and looking every bit like he was giving it his all not to just walk right out of the room, “you’re saying that Barry ran them out of this dimension?”

Cisco shared a look with Caitlin before nodding, both of them wincing slightly.

“Okay, that doesn’t answer the question as to where they are now,” Joe said pointedly.

Cisco took a strengthening breath before answering.

“If Barry time travelled, or went fast enough that it was almost like time traveling, then I think it’s possible that they are inside the speed force,” he said.

“That’s the second time I thought I heard you say speed force, now,” Diggle said, sounding very much like he couldn’t believe these words were leaving his mouth.

“It’s a dimension of its own,” Caitlin said, sparing Cisco the trouble of having to sound like a crazed nerd in front of them. “We discovered its existence not long ago. Speedsters can tap into it to go faster, or use it to travel through time.”

“Honestly, we don’t know that much about it,” he added, shrugging helplessly.

“But it’s good, right?” Iris said, only a little pleadingly. “If Barry got them there, it means he can get them out too.”

Cisco cringed, making her enthusiasm deflate as quick as it had risen.

“If he could, they would be here already,” he said. “Usually, Barry uses the speed force as a gateway, but this time he was pushed into it; it’s not a simple in-and-out trip. The speed force goes beyond time and space, they could be anywhere, and if they’re lost, I’m not sure they can find their way back that easily.”

“Great,” Thea said tightly. “So you’re saying they survived the blast, only to get stuck in another dimension, maybe even in another time.”

“There has to be something we can do, they can’t just be lost,” Felicity said, managing to sound desperate and hopeful at the same time.

That made Caitlin’s head perk up.

“If Barry knew where to find us, he could come back. We just have to show him where we are,” she said, turning to Cisco who saw the idea appear in his head as she said it. Both of them brightened immediately.

“An interdimensional beacon,” he whispered, all his inner science-creating alarms going off at once.

“A what now,” Joe and Diggle said simultaneously.

  
———

  
Thea passed the lab for the fifth time this hour, catching a glimpse of conversation between Cisco and Felicity.

“—cannot honestly believe this would work better than ultrasounds,” Cisco was saying, sounding very offended.

“How is sound supposed to reach all the way to another dimension?” Felicity retorted frustratingly, dramatically rolling her eyes.

“That’s what I’m saying!” he said back, his voice going high as he gestured animatedly at his equations-covered whiteboard. “There’s only a very limited amount of things able to cross dimensions, I’m talking fundamental forces here, I’m—”

Felicity froze. “That’s it!” she interrupted, jumping on her feet, making Cisco’s eyebrows go up an inch.

“What?”

“Fundamental forces!” she said, pointing at what looked like a big donut drawn on the board, but was probably actually a very smart and scientific-y drawing. Thea had no idea, really.

Cisco seemed to get what she was saying, though, because he immediately brightened up.

“Oh my God, we’re idiots,” he said. “Why didn’t we think of that twelve hours ago?”

“Why are we idiots?” Caitlin asked, coming back into the room with a fresh pot of coffee. All three of them looked as if they’d already had about four of them each, but Thea wasn’t going to say anything if that was what was needed to get her brother back.

“Fundamental forces!” both Cisco and Felicity said at the same time, turning to Caitlin. They sounded mildly crazy, but she seemed to understand anyway, as she made the same face as Cisco had a moment earlier.

“Electromagnetism!” she said enthusiastically, as if that cleared anything up.

In an instant they were all gathered around the whiteboard, completely erasing it, safe for the donut drawing, and that’s when Thea decided she’d heard enough. It wasn’t as if she could be any help anyway, so she resigned herself to leaving them to their science and resumed her moping.

When they’d started working on getting Oliver and Barry back, everyone had found something to do to make themselves useful almost immediately. Felicity, Caitlin and Cisco were building the beacon, while Joe and John - respectively as a CCPD detective and as Spartan - did what they could to suppress the minor chaos Monetti had caused before she’d been stopped. Thea had wanted to help too, but her leg was still in pretty bad shape from her first encounter with Monetti’s plasma projectiles and John had benched her, leaving no room for argumentation.

So she was stuck here, limping her way through STAR Labs’ empty hallways to try and keep her growing anxiety at bay. Without much success. Oliver had been missing for almost twenty-four hours now; there was no way she was going to relax in these conditions.

She rounded the corner and almost face-planted into Iris. Both of them startled, barely managing not to crash into each other.

“Wow! Sorry, didn’t see you there,” Iris said, a small apologetic smile on her lips. Even if strained, it was honest.

“My fault, wasn’t looking where I was going,” Thea said, awkwardly waving her apology away.

Iris opened her mouth to say something but paused. Her brows furrowed a little as she looked at her, and Thea suddenly felt like an open book, wondering how much of her thoughts Iris could read on her face.

“Are— I’m sorry if this sounds intrusive, but… Are you okay?” Iris asked, sounding genuinely concerned. Thea definitely wasn’t expecting that, and it took a beat too long for her to come up with an answer.

“I’m fine,” she said, and even to herself she wasn’t believable.

Iris offered a kind, understanding smile.

“It’s okay, no one here’s really fine, and no one’s expecting you to be either, given the circumstances,” she said, raising a hand to squeeze Thea’s shoulder reassuringly.

She let out a long breath, her shoulders sagging.

“I just— I feel so useless,” she said, so low she wasn’t even sure Iris had heard her until she spoke.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” she sighed, her gaze lowering absently.

Thea had never actually talked to her before now so she barely knew her, but even then, it wasn’t hard to see how tired she was. They were all harboring varying degrees of exhaustion, but she could see Iris’s weariness ran deeper than just lack of sleep. Thea recognized it, it was the same as her own. Worry ate at her a little more with each minute Oliver and Barry spent trapped in whatever that— that speed force thing was.

Of course, the others were worried too, she was sure, but at least they had something to do to keep them busy.

“I tried to go see Caitlin, Cisco and Felicity, see if I could give a hand, but I only lasted a minute before giving up,” Iris went on, a little self-deprecating smile on her lips. “I don’t think they even noticed I was there.”

“Hey, don’t sell yourself short: that’s thirty seconds more than me,” Thea said jokingly, gently elbowing her.

That made Iris laugh, and she silently congratulated herself for it. She’d tried to cheer her up, it was only right she returned the favor.

“I guess we’re just going to have to sit this one out, uh?” Iris said. She still sounded like the idea frustrated her, but it was more resigned than it had been a moment earlier. Thea understood the feeling: finding someone in the same situation as her was comforting, if not exactly helpful.

“Well, we can’t always be kicking ass, right?” she said with a smile.

“I don’t exactly kick-ass, even when I actually participate in Team Flash business,” Iris said, laughing a little. “I don’t have your badass ninja fighting skills.”

Thea shrugged. “Hey, I heard you’re a reporter, right? That’s kick-ass in its own way.”

That got her a pleased smile. She watched Iris watch her for a second, something like fondness in her eyes before she started talking again, changing subjects completely.

“You wanna grab a bite? It’s not like they’re going to miss us if we leave for an hour, and if I’m right, you haven’t eaten much more than me in the last twenty hours.”

Thea paused, opening her mouth to decline the offer without really considering it in the first place, but Iris interrupted before she got the chance to.

“We both need to get our mind off of— this,” she said, making a gesture as if to encompass their whole situation. “Even for half an hour. Get some fresh air.”

“I don’t know,” Thea said, feeling her shoulders draw up defensively, despite her best efforts to stay calm. “What if something comes up?”

“Then they’ll call us,” Iris answered confidently. Thea’s reluctance must have been showing on her face, because she added with a reassuring smile, “You can trust them, Thea. They want them back as much as we do, they’re going to figure it out.”

There was silence for a moment as Thea looked at her, seeing the confidence in her eyes. She believed what she was saying. And she was so earnest, it was hard not to want to believe it too.

“Okay, but just half an hour,” she finally conceded. Iris’s smile instantly widened.

“We’ll be back before you’ve had time to say ‘quantum physics’,” she said.

Thea couldn’t keep herself from laughing at that.

  
———

  
“So..,” Thea mused, twirling her spoon in her coffee as if to gain time to pick her words. “I’m trying to figure something out, humor me?”

Iris nodded, a small, playful - if slightly confused - smile on her lips. Thea took a long sip before leveling her with a questioning look.

“I know why I’m so anxious over Oliver being gone: he’s my brother, so even though he’s kind of a dick, it’s only normal that I care about him so much. What’s your excuse for being so worried for Barry?” She saw Iris frown, more amused than offended, and anticipated the comeback before she had a chance to say it, cutting it short, “Aside from the obvious ‘He’s my friend, and also a great human being, blah blah blah’.”

Iris barked a surprised laugh at that, but Thea still spotted the darkening of her cheeks.

“Isn’t that enough?” Iris asked, raising an eyebrow. “He is my friend, and also a great human being.”

Thea shook her head. “You know what I mean,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I can tell there’s more to you two. Are you dating?”

Iris’s gaze lowered to her coffee, momentarily getting lost in the swirls of the froth. Thea didn’t press her, savoring her own drink and enjoying the warm atmosphere of the coffee place they’d settled in. Iris had been right, getting out of STAR Labs was nice.

“We’re not really… Dating,” Iris finally broke the silence. She sounded hesitant. She raised her eyes to meet Thea’s. “Not officially, at least?”

“It’s complicated, uh?” Thea said understandingly, and Iris laughed, pulling a face as if to say ‘You have no idea’.

“Long story short, he confessed, a while ago, and I didn’t return his feelings at the time, but now I— I think I do?” she said, sounding a little like she was asking Thea to confirm her story. She stayed silent instead, letting her get to her point. “We kissed, a few weeks back, but… We haven’t really talked about it, since then.”

When she was sure she was done speaking, Thea shrugged.

“Doesn’t sound so complicated to me,” she said. “You seem to like each other. Just… Get together, you know?”

Iris huffed a small, sad laugh. “Yeah, seems stupid to worry about that when he’s stuck in another dimension, anyway.”

“Helps you put things into perspective,” Thea agreed, earning herself a sympathetic smile from Iris.

“We should do this more often,” she said suddenly, taking Thea by surprise. It must have shown on her face, because Iris laughed, adding, “Without the whole ‘our friends disappeared in a plasma explosion’ thing, I mean. We should get coffee from time to time, when they’re both back.”

Thea smiled at her. Iris was ridiculously nice - she was starting to believe it was a requirement for working with the Flash - so she could easily see herself hanging out with her again. Even if they’d originally bonded over their mutual feeling of uselessness, spending time with her had helped. Being able to act normally, to do something else than worry over Oliver, it helped her believe everything would be fine, eventually.

She meant it when she said, “Yeah, we should.”

———

“Where’s Allen?”

Joe looked up from the file he was reading, his eyes landing on Singh standing in front of his desk. By now, the captain knew who he had to ask if he wanted to find the CSI.

“Sick,” he answered without missing a beat.

He could see Singh’s eye roll as he turned to get back to his office. “Tell him I want to see him when he gets back,” he shot over his shoulder. “And to get a medical certificate!”

His door slammed shut and Joe sighed to himself, shoulders sagging. Right now, he had trouble worrying over Barry’s job - the fact that he was currently trapped in another dimension for God knows how long kind of took precedence over his potential firing - but it didn’t help that he could add that to the list of things he could be anxious about.

He liked to think being able to stay at STAR Labs with the others could have settled his nerves, but he knew that if he had he wouldn’t have been of any use there anyway. His time was better spent here, where he could distract himself with cases and make himself useful.

Before they’d ‘stopped’ her, Monetti had freed her boyfriend from prison in quite the straightforward manner, blasting a hole in his - and, subsequently, a dozen other inmates’ - cell’s wall. The precinct was now bustling with people, all trying to get their city back under control. As far as they knew, Monetti was still at large, and they could add the evasion of eleven convicted felons to their growing list of problems.

Just as he was about to get his twelfth coffee of the day, Joe felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He had it out in half a second, hoping for news on the Barry situation, but deflated when he saw the text message.

John Diggle, 01:37 PM:

Roof in two

Joe sighed and swung by his desk before heading for the stairwell, trying not to bring too much attention to himself. He didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing to anyone, it was bad enough he’s had to continuously justify it to himself in his head since this morning.

He got out on the roof, fresh air hitting his face, and wrapped his thin coat tighter around himself, getting ready to wait a while.

“Any leads?” Diggle was suddenly standing next to him, making him jump a little. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Joe grumbled. No matter how much time he spent with them, he still couldn’t understand how everyone who hung out with Oliver Queen seemed to turn into a ninja.

He reached into his bag, getting out the file he’d picked off the pile he had been accumulating on his desk since yesterday and offering it to Diggle.

“Anton Boskov,” he said as Diggle opened it and briefly scanned it over. “Convicted for robbery and assault. Shouldn’t be much trouble.”

“I’m on it,” Diggle said, already starting to turn around. “I got Jeffreys, by the way. He’s tied up in the precinct’s dumpster.”

Joe resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll send someone to get him.”

Even if he still had mixed feelings about the Arrow and his team, Joe couldn’t afford to decline the help Diggle had offered in bringing back some semblance of peace to Central City. Monetti had caused a lot of trouble, and the Flash was gone, so he’d take what he could get. He’ll have time to question their methods another day.

And he had to admit - as he got back inside to go warn someone of Jeffreys’ whereabouts - Diggle was efficient. Even if he’d never say it out loud.

  
———

“Attention everyone,” captain Singh said as he stood in the middle of the precinct. “It’s my pleasure to tell you that every single one of our escapees has been brought back into custody.”

Cheers erupted from the small crowd and even Singh himself could be seen smiling a little. Joe let out a relieved sigh.

It had taken a while, but their main problem was taken care of. Or, more accurately, the police’s main problem was taken care of, he thought bitterly. His main problem was still very much relevant.

“Okay, enough, now get back to work,” Singh instructed before retreating to his office, back to his regular self.

Joe was about to immerse himself in cases when he noticed the familiar figure standing in the middle of the bullpen, waiting. He looked around to make sure no one else seemed bothered by the stranger in their work place, then got up to go meet him.

“Something I can do for you?” he asked, feigning ignorance but giving Diggle a look.

“Just checking everything’s alright,” he answered. “I heard you caught every one of your fugitives.”

Joe narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously. They both knew he’d caught more than half of them himself. Was he trying to mock him?

When the only thing he picked up from his expression was mild amusement, he relaxed a little, reminding himself that they were on the same team.

“Yeah, we did. I guess a thank you is in order,” he said, offering a handshake.

Diggle took it. “No need to thank me.”

“Well, we’d still be running after them if it wasn’t for you,” Joe said with an acknowledging nod. “So, thank you.”

Diggle must have heard the ‘Just accept it’ in his tone, because he only smiled and nodded. “Happy to help. We have to stick together, right?

Joe smiled back. “Yeah.”

“You’re finished, here?” Diggle asked, vaguely gesturing at the precinct. “I was wondering if I could catch a ride to STAR Labs with you.”

Joe wasn’t the only one impatient to check on the state of things, then.

“Lemme grab my coat,” he said.

As they got to his car in the precinct’s parking, Joe had managed to gather enough determination to actually say what he wanted to say. He took a strengthening breath, catching Diggle’s attention.

“Listen, I’m starting to think I misjudged you,” he said. “You and Oliver. And all of your team, by association.”

“No harm done,” Diggle shrugged. “I understand we didn’t exactly give you any reason to trust us, what with Oliver shooting Barry and all that.”

Joe did a double take. “Oliver did what?” 

Diggle opened his mouth around an explanation, then seemed to think better of it.

Joe raised his hands in surrender and shook his head. “You know what? Don’t say anything, it’s water under the bridge, I guess,” he muttered. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry if I ever acted… cold, towards you, that’s all.”

Before Diggle could answer, Joe’s phone started blaring 1, 2 Step - Cisco’s contact ringtone - at full volume. Joe kept changing it, and it kept coming back. He had no idea how the kid did it.

He answered, but Cisco cut him off before he could even say anything.

“We figured it out.”

He sounded a little hysteric, but Joe wasn’t about to question it. Diggle must have read something on his

face, because he was already in the car.

“We’re on our way.”

  
———

  
Thea couldn’t see John’s face, as it was hidden behind the pile of boxes in his arms, but she could hear him groan as Felicity dumped another one on top of it.

“Alright, that’s all of them,” Felicity said, dusting her hands off on her sweatpants as she got out the van. It was weird seeing her wear something else than her usual colorful, fancy clothes, but she’d just spent the last two days stuck in a lab trying to figure out a way to get their friends back from another dimension, so Thea understood she’d want to be comfortable.

They were standing on an empty runway, two miles of flat land in front of them. Thea hadn’t even thought to ask why they were here yet, as Team Flash and Felicity all looked very absorbed by what they were doing and probably had a valid reason to have brought them all the way out of Central City to an abandoned airport. She also didn’t feel like asking any other question after the last three times they answered with convoluted scientific explanations she didn’t understand.

“Okay, get this over here,” Caitlin called from where she was standing next to Cisco and his weird machine - which was starting to look more and more like one of those evil robots from Doctor Who whose name Thea didn’t remember.

John brought them their equipment, putting it down next to the device as Cisco muttered a thank you, staying focused on whatever it was he was doing in the machine’s circuits.

“Is this going to take long?” Thea asked. She could feel herself becoming more restless by the second.

Cisco made a face and tugged off his goggles to glare at her. “Hey, how about you try building a machine capable of interdi—” He stopped as Caitlin put a hand on his shoulder. He took a deep breath, and started over, calmer this time, “It should take about twenty minutes to get it ready, and then we’ll need another ten to charge it.”

Thea nodded in acknowledgement and he went back to work. She didn’t hold his bout of anger against him, they were all on edge.

She tried to make herself useful as they waited on him to put the device together, but her leg was still giving her trouble, so the most physically demanding tasks were left to Joe and John. They had to put up some kind of giant cushions about three hundred yards away from the machine, following very precise instructions from Cisco. Again, no one really bothered to ask why, they just did it.

Thea ended up sitting next to Cisco, taking Caitlin’s place when she went to the van with Felicity to run some final calculations, passing him his tools when he asked for them.

Iris came back with snacks and coffee in the middle of it, offering them around and earning herself a lot of grateful smiles. Thea wondered if that was her own kind of superpower, always knowing how to make things a little bit better.

Finally, after the promised twenty minutes had passed and most of them had gathered around the van to wait, Cisco emerged from under his machine, covered in black smudges, with a bright smile on his face.

“I’m done,” he said proudly as he stood up. “Now we just have to charge this baby, and it’ll be ready to go!”

“That’s great, thank you Cisco,” Joe said with a sincere smile.

“Don’t forget the two other thirds of our genius trio,” Cisco said, indicating Caitlin and Felicity with a flourish.

“Let’s save the congratulations for when they’re back, alright?” John said, crossing his arms.

That clearly put a damper on the collective mood, suddenly reminding everyone of why they’d joined forces in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, it was Iris who changed the subject. “Since we got time, can you tell us what it is, exactly?” she asked, smiling at the three people who could actually do that.

There was no doubt in Thea’s mind that no one really expected to understand a thing of what would follow, but if it spared them Cisco’s kicked puppy look, suffering through another science rant was worth it.

He was all too happy to jump on the occasion and immediately went to stand between them and his machine, as if showcasing it.

“First of all, disclaimer,” he said, raising a finger in front of him in a warning manner, “I haven’t slept in fifty-three hours, so I’m a little disoriented.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine, go ahead,” Caitlin said encouragingly, very mom-like.

Cisco nodded. “Okay, so the interdimensional beacon turned out to be more like an interdimensional magnet, because, as it turns out, we can’t exactly reach outside of this dimension without using something like gravity or—”

“Get to the point Cisco,” Joe said, from where he was leaning against the STAR Labs van. His tone suggested he was used to saying that a lot.

“Yeah, right. This,” he clasped his hands together in front of him before pointing at the device with both index fingers, “is a Barry magnet.”

“It… Attracts Barry?” Thea tried saying it out loud to see if it made more sense that way. It didn’t.

“Sounds stupid when you say it like that, but in short, yes,” he agreed.

“Barry’s constantly giving off electricity as he moves in the speed force,” Caitlin explained. “We were able to tune this machine to his energetic signature, so just like a magnet, it should attract him out.” 

“In short, we’ll use electromagnetism to get Barry back, and since he’s with Oliver, we should get him back too,” Cisco added.

“Should?” Diggle repeated a little menacingly, raising a dubious eyebrow.

“Will,” Cisco corrected in a hurry. “It will get Oliver back too.”

“And why are we here?” Iris asked, opening her arms to indicate the runway.

“Well, if we’re right, Barry might be brought back here just as he’s leaving the pipeline cell, two days ago,” Felicity answered.

“I’m not even going to pretend I understood that,” Thea muttered.

“It means he might be going at full speed as he comes back, so he’s going to need room to slow down so he does’t just go splart into a wall,” Cisco said, with hand gestures to illustrate his point.

That explained the cushions. That was at least one thing Thea could understand from all of this.

It seemed to do it for Diggle. “Okay, I’ve heard enough,” he said. “We don’t need to know how it works, as long as it does.”

“It’ll work,” Cisco said confidently.

Right now, Thea was grateful for Team Flash’s unreasonable optimism. It was uplifting, even though she still had trouble silencing the small voice at the back of her head telling her she’d never see Oliver again.

If they could have so much faith, then so could she.

  
———

Cisco took a deep inhale, briefly looking at the other people around him to check he wasn’t the only one shaking with nerves right now. Caitlin gave him an encouraging nod and a tight smile and he breathed out slowly.

“Here we go,” he muttered, and he lowered the lever activating the Barry Magnet - Bagnet? Marry Bagnet?

He needed to find something cool to call it, if it worked.

The machine started humming softly as he backed away a few feet, just in case. A couple of seconds passed, feeling like eons, then Thea’s voice broke the tense silence.

“Well, this is anticlimactic.”

“Is it working?” Joe asked dubiously.

Cisco frowned. “It might need a moment to—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, as a deafening bang cut him off and they all doubled over, covering their ears reflexively. It didn’t prove very useful, as the sound only lasted a second. When they straightened up, nothing seemed different in the slightest.

“What was that?” Iris asked too loud, undoubtedly to compensate the ringing in her ears.

“It sounded like a sonic boom,” Felicity said, swaying on her feet and putting a hand on the van for support.

“Over there!” Thea said suddenly.

They all turned to her before their eyes went to where she was pointing. The cushions they’d set up further away were, for the most part, knocked over, the rest of them looking like they’d been destroyed and blown a few dozen feet away.

“My calculations were right!” Cisco squealed victoriously, throwing his hands up for a second before quickly recovering and lunging forward to catch up with the others who had already started running over there.

“Barry!” Iris and Joe called worriedly, at the same time Felicity and Diggle called for Oliver in pretty much the same tone.

Cisco and Thea were the last to reach the remains of the cushions and immediately joined the others in removing them out of the way. As Thea ripped a huge bit of padding away, they got a flash of red under the pile of destroyed mattresses and let out a collective sound of relief. It was a matter of seconds before they’d gotten rid of most of it, revealing an unconscious Barry and Oliver laying in the middle of it all. Their suits still bore proofs of their fight with Monetti, but their burns and various injuries seemed to be completely gone.

“Are they okay?” Joe asked, a mix of worry and disbelief in his tone as Caitlin checked their pulses.

She checked her watch as she counted their heartbeats, then nodded.

“They seem to be. We’re definitely taking them to the med bay, though,” she said.

Diggle and Felicity each slipped one of Oliver’s arms around their shoulders as Joe and Cisco did the same for Barry. They got them in the back of the van and drove away without even bothering to pack the rest of their stuff, Joe and Diggle taking Joe’s car and the rest of them riding with Cisco in the van.

“How is that possible? They were pretty badly hurt when they left. Now there’s barely a scratch on them,” Thea said incredulously, watching as Caitlin checked Oliver’s pupils with a small flashlight.

“You got an explanation for that, Cisco?” Felicity said, giving him a side look from where she sat in the passenger’s seat.

“I— It’s not… I have no idea,” he admitted, running a hand through his hair. There were so many things they didn’t know about the speed force, so many variables, he could feel his brain overheating already.

“They’re alive and well, that’s all that matters,” Iris said, wrapping a hand around Barry’s.

Cisco didn’t entirely agree - he had way too many questions to just leave it at that - but for now he could let it slide. He’d have time to think about it later. After they’d gotten their friends to STAR Labs and he’d slept a whole twenty-four hours.

  
———

“As a medical professional, I can now officially say that Barry and Oliver are fine,” Caitlin said as she tugged her plastic gloves off, turning to them with a bright smile.

“Thank you,” Diggle said sincerely. He turned to Felicity and Cisco. “Thank you. Even though I understood nothing of what you did, I can tell you guys worked some magic, there.”

“Not magic, science. And it was no problem. Even though, you know, we do stuff like this pretty much every week—” Cisco started with feigned nonchalance, cutting himself off when he saw the meaningful look Caitlin was giving him. He corrected, “Even though we do stuff like this often, this one was definitely extra-difficult.”

“Speaking of which, you three deserve some rest. We’ll keep watch on those two,” Joe said, gesturing at the two sleeping figures in the med bay. “We’ll wake you if anything comes up.”

The three of them nodded gratefully before leaving. Thea sagged against her chair, letting out a long breath and earning herself a knowing smile from Iris, seated a few feet away, next to Barry’s bed.

“Long few days, uh?” she said. Thea nodded, huffing a laugh.

“Is it always like this, over here?”

“Only on Thursdays,” Iris answered.

“I think I like Star City better,” Thea admitted, only half-joking.

Iris laughed, then they let the silence stretch comfortably for a while. They could hear Joe and Diggle talk in the Cortex a few feet away, laughing occasionally, and Thea suddenly realized the weight she hadn’t noticed she’d been carrying for the last sixty hours was gone.

“Iris?” she asked, already feeling herself drift away as she listened to Oliver’s calm breathing.

“Mh?”

“Do me a favor. When Barry wakes up, just date him already,” she said flatly.

Iris laughed, but even though she’d already closed her eyes, Thea knew she was giving Barry a fond look.

“I’ll think about it,” she said quietly.

**Author's Note:**

> I did so much research to make this believable it’s ridiculous (don’t actually look it up, you’ll find out it’s mostly smart terms used in the absolute wrong way. I kinda feel like I know how Flash’s writers work, now.)
> 
> So I was actually supposed to write what was supposed to be the continuation to this, but I'm a maniac and had to write the set up and then I didn't have strength to write what I wanted to write in the first place and here we are


End file.
